29 WEEKS
SERENA
‘I can’t remember a summer like it,’ Helen is saying. ‘I can’t believe how warm it was today!’
We are sitting outside, the four of us. The air is cooler now, but it is still warm enough for outdoors, just about. Only a slight breeze blows, though it’s usually windy on this side of the park. The baby in my belly is snug and still, lulled by the rock of my hammock.
Rory is piling logs in the outside wood burner. He is kneeling as if in prayer, his hair flopping into his face. Daniel and Helen are sitting together, in the swing seat. I have put candles in glass storm lanterns, twisted strings of fairy lights through the branches of the cherry tree. The wooden decking glows silvery in the light. I must remember to take a picture for Instagram.
‘Well, I’m loving the heat. Can’t get enough of it,’ Rory tells her.
‘Yes, well, you’re not pregnant.’ Helen shifts in the swing seat. She is wearing an ankle-length dress with a flower pattern: it coats her enormous belly like a tent. She is so much bigger than me, already. Her hands rest on top of her bump, fingers spread, pale and fat as starfish. ‘I’m fed up of it,’ Helen is saying. ‘We need a bit of rain. Have you seen Greenwich Park? The grass is all dead and yellow.’
‘It will grow back, Helen,’ Rory mutters. ‘You’re being dramatic.’
I place a cool hand on his shoulder to silence him.
‘We’ve got a few more warm days at least, I heard,’ I soothe. ‘Chilly in the evenings now, though, isn’t it? Do you want a blanket or anything, Helen?’
Rory tuts and rolls his eyes. ‘Of course she doesn’t need a blanket! For God’s sake. When is it ever warm enough to sit outside in the evenings in this bloody country? Let’s enjoy it!’ He says it as if the rest of us are stopping him from doing so.
Crossly, he picks up the kindling for the log burner, turns to face me. ‘Do we really need this on?’
‘Yes,’ I tell him. ‘It’s atmospheric. Besides, your sister is cold.’
At this, Daniel looks up, blinks at me through his glasses, as if he had been asleep and I have just woken him. Next to Helen’s outsized form, Daniel looks insubstantial somehow, his trousers and shirt crumpling where he fails to fill them out. He turns to his wife.
‘Are you cold, Helen?’
Helen says she is fine but pulls her grey cardigan closer, like a life jacket. Daniel starts to take his jacket off, and I motion him to leave it on.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll fetch you a blanket,’ I tell her. I pull myself up out of the hammock and head to the kitchen. There, after a backward glance at Rory, I slide the laptop out from under the papers on the table where I put it when he came in earlier. Positioning myself so I can’t be seen, I delete the search history. It only takes a second.
I look back at the three of them, through the French doors. From inside the house, the veranda looks like a little raft on a calm, dark sea. Behind the swing seat, the scattered lights of the city blink and flicker, like a civilisation on a faraway shore. Sometimes Greenwich can feel a long way from anywhere.
It was Rory who wanted to live on Maze Hill. Our house is the one with the huge sycamore tree. Rory loves to point out the blue plaque on the house next door, tell people about the famous architect who once lived there. From the way he tells the story, you can tell he wants a plaque like that on our house too, one day, talking about him.
I don’t care about the plaque, but I love the view from the balcony in our top bedroom. You can see the whole city stretched out like a silver platter, the cranes against the metal sky dotted with red lights. The shot-silk sunsets, the leaden shimmer of the Thames. I was up there earlier, trying to take a photograph for Instagram. But I can never get it quite right – the low light makes the sky seem duller, the little lights bleed into one another.
I pick up the cashmere blanket and step outside, closing the doors behind me carefully. I step over Daniel’s legs to reach Helen. He hardly seems to notice. He is eating a handful of pistachios, without much apparent pleasure. He holds them in his lap in one cupped hand, using the other to rub off the shells before transferring them mechanically, one by one, into his mouth, staring expressionless into the distance.
‘At least it’s due to get cooler now,’ Helen is saying. ‘It was so hot in the park the other day, when I was going to meet Rachel, that I had to stop and sit down in the memorial garden. I thought I was going to faint!’
I’m almost as far gone as Helen is, but I just don’t seem to be experiencing the same thing at all – this heaviness she talks about, this loss of energy. I feel charged, fortified by the baby. I love to feel her, sitting firm under my clothes, snug as a weapon. She feels powerful to me, her kicking feet, her racing heart. I feel stronger and stronger, suffused with her energy. She floods me with blood. I can feel myself growing new tissues. I walk and walk, my headphones in. My libido is high. I can feel my small breasts are swelling, my hair thickening. The muscles in my legs growing hard and firm.